Fire
The Detroit Film Theatre’s recent offerings have included many artistically grand, if socially moderate, pictures. Veteran film director Deepa Mehta’s Fire looks to break that trend. Mehta’s feature about two unhappy wives in a New Delhi household disproves myths about India with an ease that surpasses subversion. As the story opens, Sita (Nandita Das), a…
Freaky Deaky
Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, best known for his bizarre, mostly short features combining clay animation with live action, has devised an 87-minute meditation on the unruly demands of desire, focusing on the elaborate measures some people will go to for respites from their dreary existences, and the comically grotesque forms such time-outs may take. The…
Palmetto
The small Florida Gulf Coast town of Palmetto must be one of the steamiest places on earth, judging by ex-con Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), who sweats profusely when he’s not “panting like a big dog on a hot day.” What’s causing his distress — the humidity or the two femmes fatales who make him an…
Boppin’ the Blues
Detroit jazz trumpeter Dwight Adams swings to the forefront.
Afterglow
Alan Ru-dolph believes in the logic of randomness. Chance encounters, coincidence and intersecting destinies play a big part in his films, which often seem less like movies than waking dreams. His latest, Afterglow, serves as a bookend to one of his best films, Choose Me (1984). While Choose Me is about the moment passion ignites,…
Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse
The clubhouse-like dining room has a golf theme, lots of wood and brass, and white linen swathed tables. Steaks, ranging from a small filet mignon to a huge Porterhouse, come to the tables on platters sizzling with butter, hinting at the New Orleans origins of the now-international chain of very good steakhouses. Extras are all…
B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque
This place gives new meaning to the term “open kitchen.” In the center of the dining room is a massive grill, staffed by “Natural Born Grillers,” whipping up an endless array of meat, vegetables and spices. Don’t complain about the food, or the size of the portion. Not because the chef is wielding a large…
B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque
This place gives new meaning to the term “open kitchen.” Very high energy on the weekends. I’m no history major, but with all-you-can-eat dining and a full bar, it seems Khan and the boys knew how to feast.
HIGH FIVE
This CD compilation of early singles, alternate takes and remixes (and one previously unreleased track) was originally released on cassette only, in ’83, at which time it served as a post-punk reminder of at least one important point of origin for the pervasive anti-mainstream yowl of the late ’70s. Now, checking in at millennium’s end,…
Hot and trembling
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), quickly became the benchmark against which his other films are judged. But that riotous candy-colored screwball farce &emdash; with its arch, kitschy and breezy style &emdash; represents only a small part of what Almodóvar can do. His phenomenal new film, Live Flesh…
Ma Vie en Rose
Although we tend to mythologize childhood as a carefree kingdom, a playland of imagination and innocence, the real nature of our formative years will occasionally come into focus as a hairy old memory or as the content of a troubling work of art, in this case the brilliant first feature of Belgian director Alain Berliner,…
Four Days in September
The emotion best conveyed by Four Days in September, an Oscar-nominated Brazilian political docudrama, is not passion or fervor, but detachment. Director Bruno Barreto has chosen to dramatize a real-life event that, by its very nature, would elicit strong emotions, in a manner that is so even-handed it borders on the clinical. This attitude, a…
The Replacement Killers
Perhaps for the good of everyone, action pictures are fast becoming popular again in American theaters. But as part of this pop cultural process, the works of filmmaker John Woo have enjoyed a quiet absorption into our cinematic language, that is the Chinese ones, made before his recent co-option into Hollywood. It seems that even…
Sphere
Mysteries abound in Hollywood. Why, for instance, would Barry Levinson, a director capable of fine material such as Wag the Dog, waste his time on a Michael Crichton mess. The easy answer might be that time is, after all, money. More plausible is the suggestion that Levinson gets off on trying to make silk purses…
B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque
This place gives new meaning to the term “open kitchen.” In the center of the dining room is a massive grill, staffed by “Natural Born Grillers,” whipping up an endless array of meat, vegetables and spices. Don’t complain about the food, or the size of the portion. Not because the chef is wielding a large…
